Black Lives Matter

Even his most loyal supporters would have to agree, I'd say, that compassion is not our President's strong suit. His narcissism is so forbidding there's no room for other people's pain. That he cares primarily, sometimes totally, about himself, is on display in most everything he says: he has never spotted a superlative he didn't like--or hasn't used. Remember his insistence on the size of his inauguration day crowd--biggest ever? 

His antipathy for Barack Obama has multiple sources, one of which, most certainly, is the fact that his base hates the former president just as ferociously. He keeps the temp turned up on that hate, and his loyalists love it and him. 

But there's more. Obama cut him up like ring baloney at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, when Mr. Superlative wasn't even a candidate, but was leader of the pack who claimed Barack Obama's mother rigged her baby's birth certificate with the help of some sleazy Hawaiian government official because Barack Hussein Obama was actually born in Kenya. Remember that one?--Trump used the birther thing like a battle flag, and it was, from day 1, raw hooey. No matter. 

Trump took it right in the nose at that 2011 dinner, then again at subsequent Correspondents Dinners in 2015 and 2016, when Obama took the house down with broadsides that had Trump's lips puckered, steam pumping out of his ears. The Greatest of ALL can't handle public put downs.

Which is why what Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser did to our President last week has to rank as one of the best jokes of his Presidency. You must have seen it. After Trump showed his "domination" ("you've got to dominate," he told the country's diddling governors) by clearing the area so that he could walk over to the President's Church and thereby show his devoted faithfulness to Holy Scripture. Mayor Bowser politely told the American fighting men and women Trump had called up to go home. She didn't need them. 

Then, she called out her city workers and had them paint "Black Lives Matter" in huge yellow letters two blocks long down 15th Street, close to the White House.

A word on the phrase. Just a few years ago, President Donald E. Trump took that phrase to the bank by calling on his massively white base to get all steamed at what a man named Colin Kaepernick, an NFL quarterback, had ignited when he took at knee during the playing of the national anthem. At a succession of his famous rallies, he'd invoke the name of Kaepernick and thereby elicit all manner of derision because our president wrapping himself in Old Glory is something his base really loves, bone spurs not withstanding. 

What's more, back then, Roger Godell, chief of the National Football League, caved in to the Donald and created guidelines for expressions of game-time protest. Colin Kaepernick not only stayed on that famous one-knee but never returned to the playing field, becoming Trump and Godell's all-league bad boy.

But in a story that was politically far bigger than either the protests or the pestilence last week, Godell, who'd caved to Orange Man a couple of years ago, reversed field, embracing Black Lives Matter, made a public statement that stuck a sharp stick in the President's eye, in fact. Politically, that was huge.

Today, Colin Kaepernick is no longer a devil but a saint. Trump got maligned by one of his own people, big time, a guy who took off downfield, seemingly no longer afraid of getting hit by a 230-pound defensive back.

For years now, people on my side of national politics have wondered when there'd come a point, a turning point--would it be his hatred for John McCain, an audio tape in which he told a guy he liked going backstage at Miss America contests? Maybe it would be his hush money to two of his illicit bed partners, or his sweet love for dictatores. How about his mad suggestions about injecting Lysol. At what point would people begin to see the Real Wizard behind the curtain? 

Mayor Bowser and Roger Goddell last week offered yet another opportunity for his loyalists to see the emperor with no clothes. 

By his eminent disregard for truth (remember "it'll just go away" and "we've got it under control") his dilly-dallying and his lies cost thousands of American lives, but he has yet to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone. For most of his presidency, I haven't been sure that a smoking gun in his hand would do it either.

Maybe now? Who knows? Maybe it'll never happen.

"Black Lives Matter"--two blocks long. That's pure genius. Oh my, that's got to smart.